of the founders, and was for several years on the Council, of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland; is a Life Member, and on the General Committee, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; is a Fellow of the Society of Chemical Industry; was for two years President of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society; was one of the five founders, for seventeen years Senior Secretary, and for two years President, of the British Pharmaceutical Conference, an organization for the encouragement of original research in pharmacy, each of his presidential addresses "On the Relations of Pharmacy and the State" drawing supporting leading articles from the Times and other chief newspapers; the members, on his retirement, presenting him with an illuminated vellum and five hundred specially bound volumes of general literature. He was Secretary of the Food Jury at the International Health Exhibition. He also wrote the Exhibition Handbook on "Water and Water Supplies," which has reached a third edition. He has written largely on pharmaceutical education, and the relation of education to examination, his views, especially as regards compulsory public curricula, having gradually won the support of all leading pharmacists. The present chemical nomenclature of the Pharmacopoeias of Great Britain and the United States was adopted on his recommendation and long advocacy. His great work is "A Manual of Chemistry: General, Medical, and Pharmaceutical," of which there have been published thirteen large editions in twenty-three years, seven being adapted to British and six to American medical and pharmaceutical requirements. For this book he was awarded a gold medal at the Exhibition in Vienna in 1883. He was appointed by the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom to be one of the three editors of the "British Pharmacopoeia of 1885," has since been Annual Reporter on the "Pharmacopoeia" to the Council, and has been appointed by the Council editor of an Addendum to the "Pharmacopoeia." In the production of the latter he has successfully brought about the recognized co-operation of the two leading British representative bodies of medicine on the one hand and pharmacy on the other; co operation that will, doubtless, be maintained in the compilation of future editions of the great medicine-book of the empire. For this service he has received the thanks both of the Medical Council and of the Pharmaceutical Society. In the Royal Society's Catalogue he appears as author of thirty-seven original scientific papers, mostly of pharmaceutical interest, published in the Transactions of the Royal, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Societies. His scientific and educational work has gained for him not only the much coveted honor of being a Fellow of the Royal Society, but also the following twenty-one honorary distinctions: Honorary Member of the Pharmaceutical Societies of Great Britain, Paris, St. Petersburg, Austria,

Denmark, East Flanders, Australasia, and New South Wales; of the American Pharmaceutical Association; of the Colleges of Pharmacy of Philadelphia, New York, Massachusetts, Chicago, Maryland, and Ontario; and of the Pharmaceutical Associations of New Hampshire, Virginia, Liverpool, Manchester, Georgia, and the Province of Quebec. At the Chicago College the chief lecture theatre is named "Attfield Hall," and his portrait in oil is hung on the College walls "in recognition of his aid in raising the College from its ashes after the great fire of 1871, and of his devotion of the cause of education." Professor Attfield is a chemical analyst and consultant, as well as teacher. He is the Honorary Consulting Chemist and Analyst to the London Orphan Asylum. He resides at "Ashlands," Watford, Hertfordshire, in the southern portion of that rural and beautiful county, and within half an hour's railway ride of London. He is a namesake and probable descendant of the John Attfield who flourished in "the Ville of Staundon" (now Standon), Hertfordshire, in the fourteenth century.

THE "NON-SECRET" TRAFFIC.

It has long been patent that the proprietary medicine interest exerts undue and pernicious influence upon pharmacy, and many suggestions looking to relief have been offered, though to little good result, presumably because such are aimed at eradication rather than restriction and amelioration. The fact still remains that time and precedent sanction the trade in "patents," socalled; that it moreover is legitimized and fostered by legal enactment; and last but not least that the chief sufferers, the masses, clamor loudly for its perpetuity. We are thus compelled to recognize "patents" as possessing a certain unassailable status, one that must continue so long as the world endures, or until the Utopian hope is realized of assimilating all ranks and classes on the basis of uniform education, and intellectuality. There is but one measure left, and that to restrict the traffic in a way to best shield its dupes, say by taxation on the basis of assumed (not real) value, whereby may be returned to the public some portion of that of which it is fleeced.

This

But what shall be said of another and greater evil that at one time assumed a threatening aspect-the trade in "Non Secrets," that with pseudo-claims to scientific standing, is all the more misleading and insiduous because unamenable to any code of law or morals? cloud "scarce larger than a man's hand," some years since suddenly appeared upon the pharmaceutical horizon, and black with portent swiftly spread toward the zenith. Fortunately it failed in great measure, and the threatened flood and hurricane resolved itself into a noisy breeze and occasional rattle of hail. Aimed at the very vitals of medical and pharmaceutical progress, it has chiefly exhausted its efforts in the promotion of peripa

tetic charlatanism and the establishment of street fakirs; yet it continues to steal from the legitimate patent proprietor, and seeks to rob him not alone of the fruits of his investment and industry, but of the very industry itself. And not the least of its sophistical and morally pernicious assumptions is the one that totally controverts the old aphorism that "Two wrongs can never constitute one right."

As already remarked, we are compelled to concede the status of the "patent" manufacturer, including his right to name and market his products in consonance with his individual interests. While we deplore the social condition that permits and upholds this evil, and in spite of moral repugnance thereto, candor demands the admission that the harvest legally and legitimately belongs to him who scatters the seed and cultivates the ground, and not to the one who lolls on the fence and then would fain garner the sheaves. The latter is emphatically the position of the manufacturer of "NonSecrets" who copies as closely as possible, or as nearly as he dares without rendering himself amenable to processes at law, the labels, wrapper-designs, advertisements, therapeutic claims, formulas, etc., of his "patent" rival. What code of honor can attach to this, or what form of morality will sanction! The evils accruing to "patents" are thus many times multiplied. The same morals that uphold "Non Secrets" would equally justify the trade in forged cupons upon the Louisiana Lottery; the copying of tickets is as legitimate as the imitating of "patent medicines," and "patent labels or advertisements." There is as much extenuation for the one act as for the other, and in both instances the public becomes the chief sufferer since it does not receive the goods it seeks to purchase. That the Lottery and "patent" nostrums are equally pernicious, and alike hold out promises that can be fulfilled in but very few instances, is evident to the most meagre understanding; and equally evident is the fact no possible benefit can obtain to the purchase of imitations save in behalf of the promotors of the fraud. No complaint would be made if "dog ate dog" alone, but unfortunately it is the innocent that in every instance are the real sufferers.

The Non-Secret" manufacturer is not only guilty of deliberate deceit, but he is doubly despicable in that he preys alike upon the victim of the leech and upon the leech itself; he is a parasite robbing a creature that depends upon parasitism for existence. He suborns his following with promises of extended financial reward, and his schemes are so outlined, and his advertisements so speciously worded, as to delude each pharmacist into the belief he will strengthen his own position by voluntarily becoming one of the tentacles attached to the central body of the octopus, thereby increasing the blood-sucking power of the latter, and placing all trade within the reach of its remorseless and insatiable beak. Like the "Enemy" when he took the Saviour "into a high

mountain," the "Non-Secret" tempter pledges to deliver that to which he has not even a shadow of title, but of which he hopes to gain possession through the weakness and forced fealty of the tempted; for he outlines in unmistakable utterances a programme of wholesale pharmaceutical and medical brigandage whereby, at one fell swoop, "legitimate" (save the mark!) profits may be doubled, the patent proprietor robbed, the pharmacist enslaved, the medical man hood-winked, and the "dear public" confidingly duped. With the accession of the Non-Secret" millennium every druggist would be a petty patent proprietor helplessly at the mercy of a monopoly; the medical profession relegated to oblivion; the ill and afflicted squeezed and bled to the utmost limits of endurance; while the Arch-fiend of the combination in his lair gloatingly contemplated the Judastreasure-for he voices his hopes in no modest way,wrested from his dupes, and dupes' dupes-blood-money extorted from poverty and misery, constituting a quadruply damning tax superimposed upon a tax already damnatory!

Again, the "Non-Secret" manufacturer in his attempts to deceive the medical fraternity and entangle it in his meshes, blatantly boasts of the "scientific" (Sic!) character of his preparations, at the same time endeavoring to pose as a reformer who is seeking to obviate the "patent" medicine evil-though no one better than himself understands the hypocrisy of these claims, and that but for the very evil which he so sedulously copies and pirates upon, his own degrading heresy could not exist. His preparations are "scientific" because, forsooth, he prints the purported formula on every package; and of course it is all "open," "fair," "honest," "aboveboard," etc.; yet, strange to say, in spite of all this frankness, many proprietary and "patent" manufacturers do the same, and it is as notorious in one case as in the other, that any attempt to duplicate by the published formula, in many, perhaps a majority, of instances is attended by egregious failure. What guaranty is ever given of the correctness of the formula aside from the unsupported assertion of the manufacturer, who is necessarily swayed by the most selfish and sordid of motives

that of individual gain? He refuses to be measured by any standard but his own, and how high that ranks can readily be imagined, since his schemes "are conceived in dishonesty and born in deceit !" He will hardly strain at a gnat after swallowing the camel, hump, halter, pack-saddle, and all. Only recently we came into possession of one of these purported "NonSecrets" claiming to derive its virtues from fresh figs, yet the figs had existence only in a "figment of imagination," and no pharmacist need be told such preparation could not be made both active and stable, if at all palatable; and examination revealed its heralded qualities depended solely upon a mixture of senna, rhubarb, and soda.